Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, historical materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and is associated with the Frankfurt School.

Life and work[edit]

This section is based upon Marianne Franklin's article on Walter Benjamin (2003), pp 14-16.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was born in Berlin, Germany, into a ‘wealthy run-of-the-mill assimilated Jewish family’. He was raised in a well-off quarter of the city and came of age during the Weimar Republic years before becoming a political refugee, fleeing to Paris in 1933. The historical record of his life and career has been clarified with several recent detailed biographies. He often planned to open a bookstore due to his passion for book collecting, but eventually established himself by 1928 as a formidable critic. He made his living through his both journals and newspapers, and only later received a stipend from the Frankfurt School for Passagenwerk during the years of his exile, 1933 - 1940.

The longevity and extent of Walter Benjamin’s posthumous fame is due to the great breadth of his intellectual pursuits, which allowed him to circulate through the most important artistic and intellectual groups, such as G Magazine and Bataille's discussion group, the Collège de Sociologie. His publishing career while alive spanned two decades, yet begun in the 1990s by Harvard University Press, the bulk of his voluminous writings are now published. The rise of Nazism prevented him from establishing a university career. His scholarly research appeared throughout the 1920s, but slowed during the 1930s, during which time he worked on Passagenwerk. With the publication of his collected work through the joint effort of Theodor Adorno and others in 1955, Passagenwerk (Arcades Project) was first published in English at last in 1999.

Benjamin had delayed leaving Paris until the dangers became pressing, and was stopped on the Franco-Spanish border in September of 1940. In Arendt’s account, ‘the immediate occasion for Benjamin’s suicide was an uncommon stroke of bad luck’. Expecting to be sent back to Nazi Germany where certain death awaited him, he chose to take a high dose of morphine. The historical and intellectual resonances of this personal choice have become woven into the enigmatic quality of Benjamin's reception.

A crucial aspect to Walter Benjamin’s intellectual legacy is his role in critical theory, the revision of Marxist theory based at the University of Frankfurt. His close – albeit stormy – intellectual relationship with Adorno and Horkheimer, the doyens of the Frankfurt School, is an important theme in the literature. Benjamin, who ‘was no-one’s disciple’, followed but never joined the European Communist party, visited the Soviet Union yet also had an abiding interest in Jewish mysticism; contributed to aesthetic and architectural theory and philosophy of history; was an accomplished translator; wrote (famously) about Goethe, Proust, Baudelaire and Kafka, book collecting, and technological change.

"Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Zweite Fassung)", in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 7, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989, pp 350-384; repr. in Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Bd 16: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013, pp 52-95. Revision and expansion (by 7 manuscript pages) of the first version of the essay. Written late December 1935-beginning of February 1936. First published in 1989. This second version represents the form in which Benjamin originally wished to see the work published; it served, in fact, as the basis for the first publication of the essay--a somewhat shortened form translated into French--in 1936.

"The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version", trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge/London: The Belknap Press, 2008, pp 19-55. (English)

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al., Cambridge/London: The Belknap Press, 2008.

Early Writings, 1910-1917, Cambridge/MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.